Overture keyword inventory questions

ZenSEO

Student

Posts: 71

3+ Months Ago

Hey guys like many of you i use the overture-sourced keyword tracking tools to find out what keywords/combinations will bring in the most traffic... so yesterday i finally succeeded in getting my two sites listed in the top 5 on my highest traffic two keyword combination... overture says it gets 13,000+ hits/month for that keyword. i have one site #3 for the combo w/ two words and one site in the top 5 with the two words run together as one word... i'm also #1 for the 3 word combo that gets the second most traffic for these keywords... these are all on yahoo FYI... google -- I wish -- anyway, i would guess yahoo gets a pretty good amount of traffic compared to overture and the traffic should be pretty similar... but not getting near the traffic as you would expect from a keyword that gets 13,000+ searches/day on overture... i've checked my tracking tool as far as what's coming in from the search engines and i'm getting hits from those keywords but nowhere close to the 13000/day or so you would expect from being in the top 3... not even 1/100th of that. similar rankings on other search engines like altavista/msn/hotbot although not sure if i'm in the top 5 on those... you would think with the amount of rankings on those several search engines i'd get more hits... does overture really get that much more traffic or do they just pad their #s??? or is something else going on?? kind of disappointing getting to the top 5 on a competetive keyword w/ pretty good traffic then not getting a lot of traffic from it, yaknow?

fourthring

Graduate

Posts: 152

Loc: San Diego / Beijing

3+ Months Ago

first of all, if you were to get 13,000 clicks a day, can you afford it? For pay per click, you probalby set a daily budget and after you've hit your cap, overture and google stop serving your ads for the day. Does that make sense? If you are new to PPC, sometimes it's not an easy concept to grasp.

Another thing is, you need to look at your click through rate. Just because your ad is #1 or #2 in google / yahoo/ msn, doesn't automatically mean that people are going to click on it. What this means is take a look at your ad copy. You'll probably want to write 2-3 versions and test which one gets the best response rate. Do it in google since it automatically rotates all your ads and displays the one that gets the best response.

I'm going to be submitting an article this week that covers all kinds of tricks for PPC. msg me if you want the link to the article.

ZenSEO

Student

Posts: 71

3+ Months Ago

fourthring wrote:

first of all, if you were to get 13,000 clicks a day, can you afford it? For pay per click, you probalby set a daily budget and after you've hit your cap, overture and google stop serving your ads for the day. Does that make sense? If you are new to PPC, sometimes it's not an easy concept to grasp.

Another thing is, you need to look at your click through rate. Just because your ad is #1 or #2 in google / yahoo/ msn, doesn't automatically mean that people are going to click on it. What this means is take a look at your ad copy. You'll probably want to write 2-3 versions and test which one gets the best response rate. Do it in google since it automatically rotates all your ads and displays the one that gets the best response.

I'm going to be submitting an article this week that covers all kinds of tricks for PPC. msg me if you want the link to the article.

I'm sorry I didn't make myself clearer... I was using the overture ratings as a comparison to the traffic i should be getting on yahoo/msn/altavista/hotbox, which i have high ratings on all of them through my SEO... not paying for any of these clicks what i'm wondering is why i'm getting less than 1/100th the # of daily searches for a term... is it that yahoo/msn/altavista doesn't get as much traffic as overture? or that not that many people click through even though the # of searches is high? or something else?

ZenSEO

Student

Posts: 71

3+ Months Ago

bump, anyone?

jeffjeffjohnson

Born

Posts: 2

3+ Months Ago

Hey Zen,
I'm new to SEO, and people can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the problem with your numbers is that the stats you're getting from Overture's Keyword Selector tool are for monthly keyword searches, not daily. That's why your not getting the 13,000+ hits a day your expecting.

That said, I'm wondering how accurate the stats on that tool are. I used it to search a couple of search terms and it only showed about a hundred searches a month. Seems pretty low, even for more obscure terms.

Jeff

ZenSEO

Student

Posts: 71

3+ Months Ago

Well at first I thought it was monthly... in fact when i first wrote the post i put monthly and went back and corrected it after rechecking... the tool says per day, not per month. even if it were per month and not per day i'm still not getting anywhere near the traffic you would expect based on 13k/month. perhaps the answer is that search engine click through rates are about the same as banner ad click throughs -- in which case i'm probably about right

jeffjeffjohnson

Born

Posts: 2

3+ Months Ago

Really? You sure it's not monthly?

Is this the tool you're using?: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchi ... uggestion/

When I use it, the results are labeled "Searches done in October 2004". Hence I assume the numbers are monthly.

Jeff

ZenSEO

Student

Posts: 71

3+ Months Ago

Yes, I use the one that shows both overture and wordtracker. I just checked your tool and it says for the keywords i'm in top 5 in just for the one top phrase it's 1.6 million searches per month. I'm in the top 5 (on yahoo/altavista/hotbot/msn) for two sites on this 2 word keyword phrase. #1 for the second phrase that gets 89k per month. i track each hit coming in and i get probably a few dozen searches off the search engines each day for this keyword set. I understand when people get to my site it's my job to get them to stay... i'm just surprised at how few people are coming from the engines for a keyword that's supposed to be getting 13,000 searches a day and i'm #4 and getting a few dozen hits from the engine per day... ??? i know there's a lot of links that come up but i think i should be getting more raw hits if the # of searches they quote are accurate... even if those 4 engines combined got half the traffic overture delivers i should be getting hits non stop all day long whether they like my site and stay or not, yaknow? just kind of bummed after all this hard work to get ranked highly, now ranked highly and it's not making a huge difference

fourthring

Graduate

Posts: 152

Loc: San Diego / Beijing

3+ Months Ago

What's the keyword phrase if you don't mind disclosing. And what is your site?

You may want to fool around with the title and description to try to tweak the link text on the Serps. Maybe there just isn't the right combination of words that are needed to entice the visitor to click on your link. Of course do this with caution because it could effect your rankings.

madmonk

Mastermind

Posts: 2115

Loc: australia

3+ Months Ago

what are your top position keywords?
its hard to believe that overture is wrong.

also, have you considered tha fact that yr keywords may be used by your own competitors?
ie. i wanna check my competition. I used that same keywords several times a day to recheck.